Deepstaria, review: You'll believe a jellyfish can dance

Telegraph

28-02-2025

A contemporary dance show named after a jellyfish named after a submarine? Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
The deepstaria enigmatica, which gives Wayne McGregor's new piece its title, was itself christened in honour of the underwater vessel (the Deepstar 4000) from which Jacques Cousteau first spotted this remarkable deepwater creature – tentacle-free, I'm told, even if the ravishing photograph on the Sadler's Wells programme seems to suggest otherwise. Created for his supremely lithe and athletic nine-strong troupe, the steps essentially fifty shades of McGregorish corporeal rewiring, hyper-extension and undulation, Deepstaria is an economical 75 minutes long, and sans interval. The latter is a sensible choice on McGregor's part, given his keenness to immerse us as literally as possible in the void; a pause would risk shattering the illusion.
The programme notes trumpet the set's use of Vantablack Vision, a 'light-suppression coating' (intensely black paint to you and me) used to cover instruments for use in space. The idea, as you might expect, is to intensify the sense of bodies lost in emptiness.
For most of the piece, this doesn't come off quite as it might, simply because the ever-present, light-snaffling smoke tends to mask its, well, blackness – a can or two of Dulux might have done just as well. Where it does, however, come spectacularly into its own is during a passage during which it is (almost paradoxically) drenched in azure light, generating a shade not unlike Klein Blue but with even greater lustre and depth.
Against this, lighting designer Theresa Baumgartner beams out curved yellow sheets of luminescence into which the dancers slip and ripple their hands, the latter suddenly transformed into small, almost playful sea-creatures. With Nicholas Becker's AI-assisted soundscape pulsating in the background, the result is really rather gorgeous.
The same can, in fact, be said of Baumgartner's lighting full-stop, which finds more ways to flicker magically than you might believe possible. At one point, taking us more into the realm of extra-terrestrial sci-fi than the oceanic depths, it bathes both stage and house in small luminous rectangles so sharp you want to put one in your pocket and take it home with you. At another point, with McGregor transforming a pair of dancers (not for the first time in his canon) into something close to sea anemones, blood-red columns of light somehow seem to take us right to the womb-like bottom of the Mariana Trench.
If I can't quite stretch to a fourth star, it's because, although at times impressed, I never quite found myself moved by any of this, despite McGregor's best efforts to do so. The piece often calls to mind the great Russell Maliphant and Michael Hull's tireless experiments in bodies moving through light – pieces with no more 'depth' than this, but whose sheer beauty makes the skin prickle. And those initial black undies for the cast? Come on, Sir Wayne, must try harder – although in fairness Ilaria Martello does, towards the particularly pelagic end, give the cast costumes so light and diaphanous that their ripples seem to turn the air to water.
So, a considerable step up from McGregor's heinous Maddaddam of last year, though not on the same level as his startling 2023 eco-hit, UniVerse. I wouldn't necessarily mind a second 'dive', though, so he must have done something right.